But there’s something bigger going on at the Atlantic, too. Cohn told me the Atlantic now employs some 50 journalists, just on the digital side of things: that’s more than the Atlantic magazine ever employed, and it’s emblematic of a deep difference between print journalism and digital journalism. In print magazines, the process of reporting and editing and drafting and rewriting and art directing and so on takes months: it’s a major operation. The journalist — the person doing most of the writing — often never even sees the magazine’s offices, where a large amount of work goes into putting the actual product together.
The job putting a website together, by contrast, is much faster and more integrated. Distinctions blur: if you work for theatlantic.com, you’re not going to find yourself in a narrow job like photo editor, or assignment editor, or stylist.
Everybody does everything — including writing, and once you start working there, you realize pretty quickly that things go much more easily and much more quickly when pieces are entirely produced in-house than when you outsource the writing part to a freelancer. At a high-velocity shop like Atlantic Digital, freelancers just slow things down — as well as producing all manner of back-end headaches surrounding invoicing and the like.
The result is that Atlantic Digital’s freelancer budget is minuscule, and that any extra marginal money going into the editorial budget is overwhelmingly likely to be put into hiring new full-time staff, rather than beefing up the amount spent on freelancers. Cohn didn’t give me hard numbers, but some back-of-the-envelope math would indicate that more than 95% of his total editorial budget is spent on staffers, rather than freelancers.
Staffers come in, work hard at a multitude of jobs, and coordinate with each other surprisingly well; it also takes them very little time to understand how to create great web content quickly and internally, rather than relying on outsiders. Khazan had only just started her job when she tried to get Thayer to repurpose his article; my guess is that with a little bit more experience, she would have found it much easier to simply write a quick article of her own, linking to and blockquoting Thayer’s piece, driving traffic to him without having to negotiate with him at all. Look, for instance, at how
David Trifunov of Global Post tackled the subject: he wrote a short but interesting post of his own, incorporating links to three outside stories, including Thayer’s, as well as another Global Post story. That’s the natural way of the web, and it doesn’t involve any freelancing.
The fact is that freelancing only really works in a medium where there’s a lot of clear distribution of labor: where writers write, and editors edit, and art directors art direct, and so on. Most websites don’t work like that, and are therefore difficult places to incorporate freelance content. The result is that it’s pretty much impossible to make a decent living on freelance digital-journalism income alone: I certainly don’t know of anybody who manages it. There’s still real money in magazine features, and there are a handful of websites which pay as much as $1,000 or $1,500 per article. But in general it’s much,
much easier to get a job paying $60,000 a year working for a website than it is to cobble together $60,000 a year working freelance for a variety of different websites.
The lesson here, then, is not that digital journalism doesn’t pay. It does pay, and often it pays better than print journalism. Rather, the lesson is that if you want to earn money in digital journalism, you’re probably going to have to get a full-time job somewhere. Lots of people write content online; most of them aren’t even journalists, and as Arianna Huffington says, “self-expression is the new entertainment”.
Digital journalism isn’t really about
writing, any more — not in the manner that freelance print journalists understand it, anyway. Instead, it’s more about
reading, and aggregating, and working in teams; doing all the work that used to happen in old print-magazine offices, but doing it on a vastly compressed timescale.
There are exceptions to this rule, of course — websites which still pay freelance writers decent sums. The New Republic, for one, seems to be carving out an impressive niche as a place to find carefully-edited, print-quality freelance content even when the piece in question doesn’t appear in the magazine. And when the web slows down, as it does at places like
Matter, it’s quite easy to find in-depth journalism and reporting from well-paid freelancers. But in general, it’s fair to say that the web is not a freelancer-friendly place. Just be careful about extrapolating: there are lots of very good digital-journalism jobs out there, no matter how badly some freelancers get treated.
